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In my last post I mentioned that I had been watching Terryl Whitlatch's tutorials on Creature Design where she explains the anatomy of various animals and why their anatomy is the way it is. She encouraged us to ask ourselves the why of the creature before beginning a design.

One of the assignments was to create a fish hybrid using either an amphibian or reptile, and, in my search for reference for the assignment, I had stumbled upon a ballerina fish that became an inspiration for me. While I was exploring ideas for the first piece from my previous post, another idea popped into my head of a girl with hair made to look like those big flowing fins and so I scribbled it out as best I could. I wasn't sure at first where it would go but the backstory in my mind started to develop. The why of the hair would be camouflage to help her hide amongst coral and seaweed near her home. She became my version of a mermaid. She is pleasantly surprised to find a couple of friendly creatures with some similarities to her, hence the title. As you can probably guess, I'm not very good at coming up with titles. ;) But I keep trying!

This is now available as a print and other items at my Society6 and Zazzle stores.

On a related note, I should point out who Terryl Whitlatch is. I also mentioned her in my previous post and it had completely slipped my mind that some readers might not know who she is. She is an amazing artist with a background in zoology. She might be best known for her work with LucasFilm, designing many aliens and species for Star Wars Episode 1 and some of the creature re-designs in the re-mastered trilogy. Here are some additional sites featuring her work. Go check them out!

I signed up for Schoolism art classes that I hope will help me improve and grow as an artist. I'm going to post some of my completed assignments but because these are paid courses I can't go into great detail about them but I hope you get some sense out of my description.

I decided to start with Art Fundamentals with Thomas Fluharty because he's an amazing artist and I felt that it would be a good refresher course. I am also planning on taking his oil painting class later on.

Below are my completed assignments from last week, Week 1, on the subject of Seeing. The original images were in colour and I drew and painted greyscale versions. I tried to get as close to the originals as I could. It was certainly tough with all those details! For the giraffe, we were also encouraged to add in a painted background. I kept mine loose so that I would have enough time to start Week 2 lessons.